Open Beta will be starting on May 8th and we have all of the details how you can jump in on the action. From May 8th to May 18th, you will be able to visit our Open Beta page to request a key, and then hop into WildStar to experience content up to level 30. If you have already participated in any other WildStar beta event, including beta weekends and stress tests, you don’t need a new key. Just patch up, and you’re good to go!

And for more of your reading pleasure, check out below for five wild things you can do on your way to level 30!

Here's my thought: Likely, IMO Zenimax is way outspending us on marketing. I'm seeing the TV ads on Comedy Central, and we're not doing anything vaguely like that. I dunno how much those trailers (Arrival, etc.) cost - but we see them and go "oooh". From video houses, those generally cost millions. Many millions. Each. (They do get kinda cheaper as you re-use assets, etc. but still.)

For reference, our announcement trailer 3 years ago was shorter, with less combat (combat is super expensive) and ran just over a mil. Do the math and/or check out say the SWTOR 11 minute combat trailer and you can realize it probably doesn't suck to be in the trailer industry while the publishers compete for attention

Anyways, WE are pretty impressed with the TESO marketing.

Beyond that, Elder Scrolls is redonculously huge as a franchise - Skyrim sold, what, 16 million copies? So everyone knows about it in advance - check out the Facebook, TESO has literally 10x the likes. So Zen can be much more broad in their marketing.

WildStar's a new franchise - no orcs, jedi, dovahkim; no movies, no known name. We're a new developer too. So we gotta scramble a lot more to get the name out. If we just put up an ad with a Chua and the WS logo people are like "What's with the rat with a raygun? Whatevs."

And we dumped most of our money into game dev as in the long run that is what we'll need to compete.

So we put out a ton of devspeaks (raids just went up today for instance, I won't link it so as to not be pimping the game while visiting y'alls forums but I'm quite proud of that one) and flicks (story flick went up last week, IMO the best one we've done) - but it's like 8 guys on our dev team who put them together, so we're using that dev $. The narrator is one of our producers in DevSpeak (and he plays the drums in the last one too).

But we can do a lot of em which helps (that cinny team has been crunching for about 2 years, along with the rest of our devs) and fans promote them for us because they're cool, and they are a bit of a labor of love. That's what we've been trying to do to compete. But we have to show real gameplay/etc. because no one knows who we are by default, but pre-rendered stuff CAN go much more broad.

And we're depending not on TV ads, but online (it's where our market is at least, but MUCH less reach than what Zen has done).

Our strategy isn't really hidden: we're really trying to pimp people getting into open beta since our way of competing with the big existing franchises (we're not pure, we wanna be one too!) is to have people play; those that like us will stick and those that don't will roll back into their favorite game (that's OK, we'll take a shot at them again a year or two from now and see if we can compete for their gaming time then with even more content/cool stuff).

Also our devs are really active on reddit and fansites and forums (I just saw this thread as a random redditor, for instance and didn't think it would have to do with us)

Also, take heart: I don't have insight into the inner workings of Zenimax by a long stretch, but I'd be amazed if they hadn't reserved a lot of $ for the console launch - remember, console really has dominated for Skyrim. So the console timing likely IMO mean some post-launch advertising moved back to cover that when those hit; I'd personally expect a blitz then too. (Note: that's speculation. I have no real clue). Heck, if that hits near Draenor we're probably going to watch a big publisher battle for MMO attention (we'll feed our 8 guys extra caffeine I guess). We'll be long launched by then but will buy popcorn and watch.

Anyways I have a lot of respect for the Zenimax guys. I'm ecstatic that you think we're out-marketing them, since that's IMO 90% smoke and mirrors and sweat and people spreading our stuff around. And remember, we're near launch and beta's been running smoothly, so that doesn't hurt either from press/streamer/etc. attention, which is generally free. We dropped the NDA long ago to pump that up further.

And, we're spending big bucks too; it's not all grassroots, we're also a big budget title along with the other big boys. So some of that helps (I'd just argue it's actually a bit less effective with a new name/franchise)

Oh, for the record, that's not us (or paid shills) in zone chat; we don't roll that way. (My word on it, if I ever find out it's an employee it'll be an ex-employee)

Just a perspective from the other camp. Mods, please remove if a Carb dev posting here isn't appropriate. Or Zen guys, drop me a line if you'd like me to delete this and I'll do so.

(Zen devs: Respect, by the way, on launch - as we all know just getting these monsters out of the door is fricking hard, and it's gotta feel good to be launched). Looking forward to doing that for WS too

Security: use unique password for WildStar, there should be two-factor auth for launch, Google Authenticator based. Not physical. Basically the same as WoW's authenticator.
Head start is at a weird time because it's a global game and they want to make it as timezone neutral as possible.
About launch: Open Beta and Ops Week used to test to see how they can ensure a smooth launch. Test disaster recovery before launch. Head Start is more of a soft launch and helps lessen the load.
Server capacity: not giving a specific number but it's larger than other MMOs (but smaller than a megaserver). They want busy, healthy servers that have more than enough room for everyone.
Blame Cougar if the servers go down!
If a server crashes, 95% of the time they don't need human interaction to come back up. They're built to do it themselves very quickly.
There will be a patch before Head Start, but it won't be a huge one. Patch should be tonight.
About botters/gold spammers: Game Surveillance Unit will be using active and passive spam/bot detection. Cheat detection logs (called JRK logs lol). Policies in place to help stop false positives. Not giving away their secrets!
About Multiboxing: if you're doing it yourself without the use of 3rd party programs/bots/macros, it's allowed. One keypress for multiple characters is not allowed.
Probably no server statistics pages for a while because they're super busy, but they would like to do them eventually.
No set downtime for maintenance (i.e. weekly etc). Prefer to deploy patches on Thursday or Tuesday. Probably higher concentration of patches during launch month.
Raids reset 10AM UTC Tuesday.
They have the tech for realm transfers, but they don't know when they'll be available.
Do not need to redownload the game for head start/launch. However if you have had WS installed for a long while, it might be worth reinstalling for a possible performance boost.
Preorders who've played open beta shouldn't have to do anything else for launch. Preorder keys have a grace period after head start of three days (ends June 5th 23:59) to enter your full game key if you're getting a physical copy.
Servers should come up for a little bit tonight. Login stress test. Will be unstable.
Login stress test will help test problems and make it more stable. NCSOFT's login infrastructure is tried and true and they're using that. So far not many login problems so they're optimistic.
Housing - you can neighbour your alts' houses. Gold isn't shared between characters. Further info coming.
Aurin are most popular race! #totesadorbz

Looks like outdated config files from early beta and conflicted addon settings that left from UI 1.0 were reason of my poor game perfomance. After "clean boot" I got visible FPS boost on the same video settings that I used before.

starting July 10th, anyone with an active 2-Step Verification attached to their account gets one of the sweetest rides on Nexus, the Retroblade Mount.

If you’re already enrolled in 2-Step, you will automatically receive the Retroblade Mount in your Account Inventory by July 10. Don’t have 2-Step Verification but want a sweet mount and a safe account? Check out our Knowledge Base article or read our FAQ below to learn more about 2-Step Verification!